DVD Voice

The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day is a sequel to the popular Boondock Saints. This one, however, doesn’t really cut it.

The action is ok, but the attempts at humor, which might be ok in a drunken group are just too over the top. It’s like your seeing mafia types and police and FBI detectives acted by the Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern – at once laughable for the inane comments they make referencing pop culture, and at the other part so damn stupid it makes you wonder how they ever got to those positions as police detectives or crime lords/underlings.

The McManus Brothers are in Ireland and they hear of a killing of a priest inside a church in Boston. Before the police are finished removing the body from the church even, they have heard about it (because someone is making it look like they did it) and are stowed away on a freighter bound for America. They meet up with Mexican named Romeo on the boat and he decides he’s coming with them because he can hook them up in Boston when they get there. Not trying to give away the story but their father will end up needing to appear from Ireland as well and how he knew about what was going down, well, we’ll never know.

The movie is highly quotable, if you’ll take time to remember some of the lines. As Murphy would say, “Let’s do some gratuitous violence.”

Rated R. 118 minutes (1 hour 58 minutes). Profanity. Violence. Nudity is a few views of naked men’s butts. There are some tempting cleavage shots and almost down blouse on Julie Benz, but sadly…

Ben Kingsley and Jim Sturgess star in Kari Skogland’s 50 Dead Men Walking, a film based on a true life story about the Irish Republican Army. As a drama, I felt it was a good film … realistic and will keep your interest. My main problem with the film was that it didn’t make the IRA situation and Northern Ireland understandable, in fact to me it make it a little more convoluted.

I didn’t mind the violence, or the torture, or the profanity, it was all a well done part of a captivating movie. It did leave you feeling sad for the guy who seemed destined to have only one option in life and he did not have the opportunity to make a choice.

It is a well-done, almost recommendable piece, that those who are drawn to this subject matter will probably like.

Rated R. 117 minutes (1 hour 57 minutes). Violence – and realisticly done. Profanity. Plus given the Irish dialect, there may have been more profanity than I realized or maybe you’ll actually pick up on less!

Tonight’s movie went into corporate crime, with The Informant! starring Matt Damon in Steven Soderbergh’s film. I must say that I enjoyed it.

Basically it’s a story about America’s top executive to turn whistleblower. He beings working with the FBI about the price fixing going on at ADM. He works with them for over 2 1/2 years getting video and recordings of meetings, but in the end it begins to also appear that he’s embezzling and he gets prosecuted as well.

What’s not to enjoy about this film — the happy-go-lucky bouncy music set against a backdrop of big corporate deals, white collar crimes, FBI agents, and possible jail time, and the while Mark Whitacre goes merrily along seemingly uncaring about the lies he’s telling or when or if they’ll catch up with him. It’s neat to see him just invent (I think) something new when he realizes he’s being discovered and how most of it then checks out, at least for a while. I say “I think” here because he’s so full of stories that you have a hard time really realizing which one of them, if any, are factual. He suffers from bipolar disorder, even as the forged letter from his would-be psychologist states in very specific terms. He must be a brilliant guy to keep all this straight for as long as he did, and that 2 million, no 5 million, or is it 7.5 million? I think it was 9 million, that he embezzled. Maybe it was 11…

Entertaining film! You don’t really learn anything and the drama isn’t really there, its just downright entertaining. So, have an enjoyable evening.

For me, the most sobering thing (aside from the white collar crime, don’t do that) is that in 1992 people with desk jobs were making $100K. When do I get a raise? I’m way underpaid!

Also interesting is ADM’s statement about the movie you can see by clicking here.

Rated R. 108 minutes (1 hour 48 minutes). Why it’s rated R, I don’t know! There is some profanity. No blood, no nudity, no violence aside from the alleged hit in the head by a briefcase.

I’m not entirely sure how this one made it into my NetFlix queue. I think it was one of those days where I saw the title, thought it looked interested but tossed it to the top of my queue so I could look at it closer at home to decide if I wanted to see it or not. I forget to take things out…

This movie, Bronson, is about Britain’s most notorious criminal, Charles Bronson or Michael Peterson. The actor, Tom Hardy, does a rather intense job as Bronson. But given that the real life Charles Bronson has spent over 36 years in jail (and 30 of that in solitary!) most of it is shot in a prison environment. There is a lot of violence and profanity. It is one of those films that makes you appalled at how people can be so violent. He just didn’t make sense!

In the traditional caper or crime movie, you have the scheme they try, and you see the police closing in, etc and you have some suspense. This movie, he’s sent away very early on in the story part of the film for an armed robbery of a post office and he pretty much stays in prison until he gets out almost 20 years later and stays out for 69 days before he’s back in.

The film intersperses him on stage in front of an audience being a famous celebrity and entertaining and some of the other parts of the movie move rather slow. The music choices, what sounded like symphony and opera music was ironically mismatched to the subject matter.

As for the action and fight scenes – a few of those scenes are “ok” but most of them are not as hard hitting as they could be and usually involve multiple prison guards surrounding and eventually beating on him. Far better action movies out there.

Rated R. 92 minutes (1 hour 32 minutes). Profanity – lots and lots of profanity. Nudity – there is a scene with a topless stripper, it was nice, and some other scantily clad females but given this is a prison movie, there are frequent nude prisoner scenes as he prepares to fight the guards and you can sadly see every bit of him you might ever care to. Or you can look away or better yet, not look at this movie at all!